Simple Chemistry

What amounts to various and simultaneous interactions along the electron shell–simple chemistry in a complex dance–that this can generate the self-replicating molecules that result in what we call life, and that that life can happen to observe the universe and itself as a “self” is amazing. Not so much mind-boggling as mind-expanding.

And there is no purpose to it other than perhaps helping thermodynamics along. As well as the progressive march of life itself into the void. Whether that life is homo sapiens or the gaggle of bacteria that work in tenuous balance to keep said sapiens sapiening makes no difference.

The only purpose is whatever purpose you decide upon. Myself, I like to write. And enjoy various sunrises and sunsets. The gas we exist in on this spinning rock, you see, does interesting things to the light that passes through it from the ball of plasma ninety-three million miles from here. Various atoms created in a long-extinct stellar furnace have come together over and again to create sunrises and sunsets, and to create the brain which makes the mind that calls itself a “self” and writes about something called a “fuchsia-purple sky on a winter evening in Kansas City in 1987.”

The problem arises when that “self” takes itself so seriously that it thinks it exists outside of the nature that made it possible, or outside of the clam chowder that is the brain.

The problem of evil, ladies and germs, is this very error–hamartia writ large.